AWS Go SDK announces foreseen play for software pros

AWS has listened to its users by recently announcing the release of AWS Go SDK. Learn what this means for developers.

Software pros weren't surprised when Peter Moon, AWS senior product manager, revealed on Jan. 29 that an AWS Go SDK is a work in progress on AWS Labs Github account. After all, adding the open source Go programming language is a natural competitive move by AWS. OpenStack has a similar Go initiative. Go was developed by Google and originally centered around Google's Cloud Infrastructure.

On the plus side, adding the open source Go programming language SDK to AWS is Amazon's way to tell developers, "We're listening." Yet, developers recognize it's a play in platform vendors' -- particularly Google, AWS and OpenStack -- competition to integrate PaaS with IaaS to win their business. Naturally, as objects of this attention they benefit, but they're also wary of lock-in tactics.

AWS is certainly following the market, because developers will drive "the majority of AWS adoption over the next several years," said David Linthicum, CTO and founder of Blue Mountain Labs. Go is also where the action is now, he added. "The open source community has clearly adopted Go, and I'm seeing many Go projects appear on my radar." He sees Docker projects as the most obvious use of the Go programming language, but there are many others.

In a recent project, developer Chris Moyer chose Node.js over Go, even though the former's performance tested slower, because Go lacked an AWS SDK. Though he wished it had come sooner, Moyer, vice president of technology for content services provider Newstex LLC, gives an AWS Go SDK a thumb's up. He likens Go to Amazon's Python SDK add-on, saying both improve developers workflow by making the libraries used to connect to AWS better and easier to use. Also, developers will benefit from using AWS APIs with Go.

Dan Sullivan, principal at DS Applied Technologies, also sees AWS Go's performance as a boon to developers. "Go is specially designed for high performance, distributed processing," he said. "It has many of the performance benefits of languages like C, with an ease of programming we don't expect from such languages."

Most software pros see most early adopters of Go being start-ups and SMBs, a strong demographic for AWS. "Go has a lot of startups excited as [it makes] application scaling easier," said Ilja Summala, CTO of NordCloud, an AWS Premier Channel Reseller Partner in Sweden. Adding AWS APIs and IaaS scalability to Go will push it up into enterprise development quickly. Right now, said Summala, the AWS Go SDK won't give enterprise developers a "reason to get up in the morning."

Enterprise developers will need to keep their eyes open as cloud providers tie PaaS to IaaS, according to cloud experts such as Constellation Research President Ray Wang. Consolidation will tamp down some of the chaos in the glutted PaaS provider market, but it will also increase the risk of vendor lock-in. Make no mistake, he said, "they do want to limit choices."

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